This disclosure relates generally to social networking systems, and in particular to presenting content items associated with advertisements to users of a social networking system.
A social networking system allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Users may create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system provides an ideal forum for advertisers to increase awareness about products or services by presenting advertisements to social networking system users.
Presenting advertisements to users of a social networking system allows an advertiser to gain public attention for products or services or to persuade social networking system users to take an action regarding the advertiser's products or services. Many social networking systems generate revenue by displaying advertisements to their users. Frequently, social networking systems charge advertisers for each presentation of an advertisement to a social networking system user (e.g., each “impression” of the advertisement) or interaction with an advertisement by a social networking system user.
Conventional social networking systems receive multiple advertisements from advertisers or other entities and select advertisements for presentation from various advertisements received from different advertisers. However, this requires advertisers to provide information describing a large number of advertisements and the SNS to allocate resources to determining whether a large number of advertisements comply with SNS advertisement policies. In these conventional social networking systems, an advertiser expends significant resources generating multiple advertisements for potential presentation to SNS users, and the SNS also expends significant resources evaluating a large number of advertisements received from different advertisers.